And Having Voted...

[rain_gryphon]

Voting went smoothly. There are six machines this year. Two of them were actually in use, so it's not as completely dead as I've seen it in the past. We're voting again on the touchscreen machines, with the little paper tape that rolls through the window. As in all offyear elections, I basically walked in and voted.

Comments

[whitetail.livejournal.com]

Isn't OH a battleground state? Interesting to hear that your polling place was so dead...

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Thereby hangs a tale. I live in Franklin county, which together with Cuyahoga county (where I used to live, although I doubt if my residency is a factor) is one of the two Ohio swing counties that actually decided the election in 2004. In some sense, I was at the very heart of the 2004 election.

Everyone here heard all of the horror stories about people being prevented from voting, people being intimidated, voting machines not registering votes correctly, and so forth. Everyone had heard about all of this, but nobody I talked to had any personal experience of any of it. It was always something that someone had heard about from a friend of a friend. Interestingly, some of the stories I started hearing several days before the election, phrased in the form of 'The Republicans are going to do XXX'. After the election, these were the same stories that popped up on the national news as 'XXX happened'. My personal belief is that it was Jessie Jackson's camp planting those rumours. You couldn't even go downtown for the last week without seeing him holding a rally.

We did have an exceptionally long wait to vote in 2004. We had about 40% turnout that year, and (I think) about 20% this year. I posted about 2004 at http://xolo.livejournal.com/42308.html Basically the new machines were just poorly designed and took forever to use. They ditched them after two elections. The slowness was the only issue I saw that year, though.

What I really recall best from that whole episode was a magazine article (from some national magazine too) that Snuhwolf posted on ALF after the election. It recounted a tale of how in Franklin county the Democratic candidates' names would 'slowly fade from the touchscreen'. That sticks with me - it's an arresting image. The thing is, we didn't have touchscreens that year. The candidates' names were printed on a label (all on one big label, so you couldn't swap 'em), and the machines had push buttons. I kept hearing that story repeated on discussion boards, about the names fading from the touchscreens, and I know for a fact it was pure BS.